An Associated Press article covering President Bush's January 12 visit to storm-devastated New Orleans highlighted his insistence that "stronger promised levee protection will make the city both safer and more attractive for investment." But the article made no mention of the White House's refusal to commit to a levee system designed to withstand the most severe storms, on which numerous other news outlets have reported.

In a conversation with Radio Factor host Bill O'Reilly about President Bush's secret authorization of warrantless domestic wiretapping, Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew P. Napolitano asked: "Would you feel this way if Hillary [Clinton] were president?" Napolitano then added: "Because then you know the pro-life and the pro-gun will -- they'll be targets of warrantless searches. ... And maybe conservative commentators will be targets of warrantless searches."

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post reported that President Bush's meeting with a bipartisan group of former secretaries of state and defense to discuss Iraq war policy lasted one hour. By contrast, The New York Times reported that the actual discussion lasted only 5 to 10 minutes, and the rest of the time was devoted to an "upbeat" briefing on the war.

Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court prevented the FBI from accessing the laptop computer of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the September 11, 2001, terrorist plot -- immediately prior to the attacks. In fact, the Moussaoui case never reached the FISA court.

Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute falsely claimed, in an article in the The Weekly Standard, that FISA prevented the government from getting warrants in the Zacarias Moussaoui and Wen Ho Lee cases, even though formal reviews of those cases determined that it was misinterpretation of FISA, not the law itself, that prevented the FBI from getting the warrants in question.

A New York Times article characterized the National Security Agency's domestic spying program as "eavesdrop[ping] on some international calls involving people in the United States." However, the exact scope and dimensions of the program remain unclear, and there is evidence that it intercepted communications in which all parties were located in the United States.

Both the AP and Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume reported on a White House event in which U.S. attorneys appeared and spoke in favor of President Bush's efforts to renew controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act. However, both media outlets omitted the fact that all of the U.S. attorneys participating are Bush appointees.

Fox News' Stuart Varney said that The New York Times "will do anything to undermine President Bush politically, including undermining the security of the country," and then referred to an unscientific poll to suggest that 96 percent of Americans want warrantless wiretapping.

A Newsweek article asserted that the reaction to the Bush administration's warrantless domestic spying program was "predictably partisan," even though numerous Republican elected officials, conservative commentators, and newspapers that endorsed President Bush's re-election in 2004 also criticized the program.

An article in the January 9 edition of Time magazine by Karen Tumulty and Mike Allen misrepresented remarks by Rep. Jane Harman by falsely claiming that she had defended President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program. In fact, in her statement, Harman said that the surveillance program "goes far beyond the measures to target Al Qaeda about which I was briefed."

On The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that President Bush "kept all members of the Senate and House intelligence committees up to speed" on his program of domestic, warrantless electronic surveillance. But Republican and Democratic members of Congress have contradicted this assertion.

Conservative media figures have defended the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program by citing a Rasmussen poll saying 64 percent of Americans believe "the National Security Agency [should] be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States." But the key issue, which the poll misrepresents, is not whether surveillance of terrorism suspects should take place at all -- something about which there is little controversy -- but whether President Bush violated the law by approving warrantless searches of domestic phone and email communications.